Category: Drama

It’s April 1920, and we’re in Gothenburg, Sweden. We’re on our way to the Lorensberg Theatre, to see a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Critics have been raving about it. It’s been hailed as marking a new ‘epoch in Swedish theatre history’, so we’re off to see what all the fuss is about.... Continue Reading →

My review of a fantastic adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. Published in 1955, Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings imagines a village’s reaction to an old man with wings appearing in a couple’s courtyard — a man assumed to be an angel.... Continue Reading →

My review of Bialystock & Bloom's production of Maurice Maeterlinck's two early plays 'The Intruder' and 'The Seven Princesses'. Bialystock & Bloom Productions took on an ambitious project by deciding to stage a double-bill of Maurice Maeterlinck’s early plays, The Intruder and The Seven Princesses. Penned in 1891, these two plays were formative for the... Continue Reading →

I've just had a short film released by the BBC! I am incomparably excited about this. It's available from BBC Arts - I'm talking about why we should listen to history as well as look at it, exploring Max Reinhardt's 1933 production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

I’ve just come back from the Sage Gateshead, where I was at Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival for my last official outing as a New Generation Thinker. It was a little different to the essays and discussion shows I’d done so far: we all had to come up with a “controversial idea” for an academic... Continue Reading →

My essay on Strindberg & 'The Woman Question' is now available from BBC Radio 3. I'm discussing why Strindberg got arrested for blasphemy in 1884, and what relevance that has to Swedish politics today. I also touch on why Strindberg injected morphine into Berlin fruit trees... The talk will be broadcast on Thursday 6th October... Continue Reading →

My appearances for Radio 3 Free Thinking are now available to download from the BBC website. Ahead of the re-release of Peter Watkins' 1974 biography of the artist Edvard Munch, I looked at how Munch's biography relates to his art (and why Strindberg threatened to kill him). You can hear my thoughts here, or alternatively... Continue Reading →

How much “Shakespeare” is there in a Shakespeare play? A facetious question, perhaps. But it’s a question that is peculiarly specific to the theatre — how much of the author can one distinguish in a play text? Unlike the novel, with its possibilities for narrative stretches where the author’s “voice” can emerge, in plays the author is heard through the lens of an actor playing a character. And that’s before you take in to account the director, stage and sound design, costumes, lighting… Of course, in poetry and prose the author can also adopt masks and assume characters, but the presence of multiple voices is more acute when dealing with live events such as plays. This relationship between page and stage, and the position of the playwright’s authorial voice, provided the subject for Sir Tom Stoppard’s first lecture as the Humanitas Visiting Professor of Drama at Oxford University. With characteristic…